iproute2 is an open source command-line utility for GNU/Linux and UNIX-like systems, providing an enterprise-grade set of tools for controlling the TCP/IP networking behavior in Linux kernels 2.2.x and later.

Easily control IPv6 and IPv4 configurations

As mentioned, This project is comprised of several command-line tools, including the popular ip and tc ones, which are regularly used by system administrators to control IPv6 and IPv4 configurations, as well as to control network traffic.

A drop-in replacement for ifconfig and route

Even if iproute2 exists for a considerable amount of time, most Linux distribution packagers still include the old ifconfig and route command-line tools for configuring the network, which provide a limited feature set!

Getting started with iproute2

On GNU/Linux distributions, this project can be found in the default software repositories as iproute2 or iproute. Modern and mature Linux kernel-based operating systems include this package by default, so you won’t have to do anything.

However, many other distributions of Linux don’t come with iproute2, which means that if you want better tools for controlling your network interfaces, you must install this project either by downloading and compiling the latest sources from Softpedia or by using the pre-built binary packages from your distro’s repos.

To install from sources, download the latest tarball from the dedicated download section above, save it on your path, extract it, open a terminal emulator, navigate to the location of the extracted files and type the “./configure && make” command, without quotes.

After a successful compilation, you can install the iproute2 project system wide, simply by executing the “make install” command as root or with sudo, without quotes, of course. Its command-line components can be easily accessed from the terminal window, type ‘ip’ or ‘tc’ to view what options are available for controlling networking on your powerful and secure GNU/Linux operating system.

iproute2 was reviewed by Marius Nestor, last updated on February 11th, 2015